Turn a Mongolian gown into a cloth

Besides working on the 3D model, I also maintain a Chinese dance site that I involves. Recently I need to create a Flash animation to promote a Mongolian dance piece that we did last October. At the background I want to have a nice piece of Mongolian styled cloth. I found a Mongolian gown form a book, and decided to use it as the base of the cloth. Here's how I did it:

1. Import the bitmap image. You can just drag and drop your image on the Illustrator document.

2. Select menu item [Object]->[Envelop Distort]->[Make With Mesh...]

3. Enter column and Row of the grid that you want the image to divide into. In this case, I used a 4x4 grid, which worked pretty OK.

On my Pentium 4 2.8GHz with 1Gb memory, it took 15 seconds to re-calculate the bitmap everytime I moved a vertex. I wonder if there's anyway to speed things up. Let me know if you have any idea.